Changing the way we think about universities

open-research-data-report.pdf

TItle: Open Research Data: Report to the Australian National Data Service (ANDS)

Authors:John Houghton. Nicolas Gruen

Summary:
An interesting 2014 report assessing the value of data in Australia’s public research. Estimates for Australia extrapolated and scaled from UK studies. Staffing makes up more than 50% and up to 90% of the cost.

Main points:

Research data are an asset we have been building for decades, through billions of dollars of bublic investment in research annually. The information and communication technology (ICT) revolution presents an unprecedented opportunity to ‘leverage’ that asset. Given this, there is

increasing awareness around the world that there are benefits to be gained from curating and openly sharing research data (Kvalheim and Kvamme 2014).

Conservatively, we estimate that the value of data in Australia’s public research to be at least $1.9 billion and possibly up to $6 billion a year at current levels of expenditure and activity. Research data curation and sharing might be worth at least $1.8 billion and possibly up to $5.5 billion a year of which perhaps $1.4 billion to $4.9 billion annually is yet to be realized. Hence, any policy around public funded research data should aim to realise as much of this unrealised value as practicable.